So many questions...
This is a June 2003 photo of Pat Tillman, a former Arizona Cardinals football player, who, according to Reuters, "gave up a $3.6 million sports contract to join the military's elite special forces" (the Army Rangers) after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and was killed Thursday in a firefight in Afghanistan. Tillman was 27 years old. I can't help but wonder about the social forces that created someone who looks like a musclebound caricature, a cartoon superhero. I wonder about the pressure that Tillman might have had while growing up to be ridiculously macho, and I surmise that all of the attention and other social rewards he received reinforced his machismo. Can it not be said that the same social forces that created him are also responsible for his death? And because he was a football player, is Tillman's death more important than the deaths of the 715 other American military personnel who have died in Iraq (at the time of this writing) since the Bush regime's illegal, immoral, imperialistic and unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, which was predicated upon the Bush regime's bold-faced lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and thus posed an imminent threat to the United States and its allies?
And what about this poor guy, 20-year-old U.S. Army reservist Keith Maupin of Ohio, shown in stills from an Al-Jazeera video, who still is being held hostage in Iraq? Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser and one of "President" Bush's surrogate liars, has said that the United States won't negotiate for his release (although she's probably not lying about that one). What if it were one of George W. Bush's or Dick Cheney's children who were taken hostage instead of some kid from Ohio? Would we negotiate then?
Why won't the Bush regime let us see photos like this one, an April 7 photo of the caskets of American military personnel who were killed in Iraq being secured inside a cargo plane at Kuwait International Airport? After this photo appeared in The Seattle Times, the photographer, Tami Silicio, was fired by her employer, Maytag Aircraft, a U.S. military contractor, for violating the Pentagon's ban, since 1991, of photos of caskets of U.S. military personnel being returned to the United States. Why do we allow the Pentagon to violate the First Amendment and in so doing try to hide from us the true costs of wars fought for the rich? How can we Americans make informed decisions about war if our government censors coverage of wars -- wars that are paid for with our children's lives and our tax dollars? Why do we allow our young people to die for the interests of the rich elite, and why do we allow the rich elite to divert billions and billions of our tax dollars from the things that we need -- such as healthcare, education and environmental protection -- to their bogus wars, which serve only to line the pockets of military contractors, such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton? Why do we Americans allow the rich elite to subvert our democracy, to steal from us and to kill our children?
Is the personal wealth of these two stupid white men and the personal wealth of their cronies really worth all of this? If people from foreign lands were to cause the amount of damage to us Americans that these two men have caused us, wouldn't we declare war on them?
9:33:26 AM 
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